The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry, the communications industry and the consumer electronics industry. This advance has been even further accelerated by the extensive consumer and business involvement in the internet over the past two years. It seems as if virtually all aspects of human endeavor in the industrialized world will potentially involve human-computer interfaces, and especially such interfaces to communication networks such as the internet. As a result of these profound changes, there is a need to make computer directed activities accessible to a substantial portion of the world's population which, up to a year or two ago, was computer-illiterate, or at best computer indifferent. In order for the vast computer supported market places to continue and be commercially productive, it will be necessary for a large segment of computer indifferent consumers, workers and business people to be involved in computer interfaces. In addition because of the vast amount of information potentially available through networks such as the internet, there has been an increasing demand on the part of relatively sophisticated users for implementations which make display terminal access to the internet less cluttered and confusing and of course easier to use.
The present invention is directed to the problems of providing less cluttered and easier graphical display access to communication network nodes, objects associated with such nodes as well as the attributes of such objects. In order to solve such problems, the above mentioned SYSTEM FOR DISPLAYING A COMPUTER MANAGED NETWORK LAYOUT WITH TRANSIENT DISPLAY OF USER SELECTED ATTRIBUTES OF DISPLAYED NETWORK OBJECTS, R. R. Scaer et al., application makes use of transient displays in which user selected attributes of such nodes and objects may be displayed. The present invention relates to circumstances where an attribute common to a plurality of displayed objects needs to be displayed in a plurality of common transient displays respectively associated with said plurality of objects for comparison of attributes and similar purposes. The present invention does this while keeping display screen clutter to a minimum.